MORE CLUSTER - MEANS MORE ENJOYMENT!

Ahem--as good as peanut clusters are, server clusters are even better. You may remember a while back we've moved customer accounts onto a server cluster. We've added a seventh and eighth machine to the cluster, building better reliability into our web hosting services.

One or more machines can fail without any significant impact on performance. In fact, all eight machines would have to go down in order to interrupt customer websites.

WHEN I GET E-MAIL ATTACHMENTS, I CAN'T OPEN THEM - WHAT'S WRONG?

The short answer is that opening attachments successfully depends almost entirely on the programs installed on your computer and has almost nothing to do with our e-mail servers or our web-based e-mail system. For those who want to know more detail, here goes.

A Warning About E-mail Attachments

Most people know to discard attachments from people they don't know. If you've never heard this bit of advice, heed it because it's valuable. Attachments are the most common method for spreading computer viruses.

Be especially wary of attachments with the following extensions:

• ".exe" - "Exe" stands for "executable." In other words, it's a program that does stuff--some of which may be malicious.
• ".com" - "Com" stands for "command" and is attached to program files. In other words, it's the same as a ".exe" file.
• ".pif" - "Pif" stands for "Program Information File" and is related to ".exe" files in that ".pif" files can affect how programs execute--in other words they can modify how programs on your computer execute.
• ".scr" - "Src" stands for "Screensaver" but is an executable file just like ".com" and ".exe" files. As a result, these files potentially can do anything to your computer, including formatting your hard drive, deleting files, and other drastic stuff.

Islandnet customers are protected to a very large degree because we filter incoming and outgoing e-mail with up to three different filters. Nonetheless, if there is a new virus out there--not yet documented--it's possible it could arrive in your inbox.

Finally, even if you know the person who sent you a file, you should still be wary. Many people pass along files they think are fun or interesting, despite the fact the file may be infected with a virus.

E-mail Attachments Opened from Your E-mail Program

When attachments are sent with an e-mail they are first encoded for transmission through an e-mail server. Think Star Trek. Think crew being beamed all over the place--their molecules being rearanged for travel through space, then re-assembled at their destination. That's what happens to your e-mail. Cool!

When everything works as it should, you get the exact same file sent to you from the sender's computer. Everything is re-assembled and ready for you to open.

So what's happened when an attachment won't open?

The most common cause of stubborn attachments is a lack of software to open them. In other words, you may not have the proper software to handle the attachment sent to you. If someone sends you a Word for Windows file and you don't have Word for Windows installed on your computer, you're out of luck until you get Word for Windows or a program that knows how to handle Word for Windows files. (By the way, Open Office offers an office suite that can open Microsoft documents).

A related cause is that you may have an older version of the software than the version with which the file was created. You can either upgrade your software or ask the sender to resend the file but saved for compatibility with the earlier version.

Although it's fairly rare these days, it's also possible the file is corrupted either before it was sent or during transmission. You can ask the sender to check the file and resend it if the file won't open the first time.

Another possible cause of uncooperative attachments is improper encoding. In other words, when the file was first sent the e-mail program used to send the file encoded it in an uncommon format. As a result, when the file arrives, your e-mail program doesn't know how to handle it or it decodes the file using an algorithm it believes is correct but which produces gibberish.

E-mail Attachments Opened using Web-mail

When you view your e-mail using our web-based e-mail system, your browser is responsible for handling everything. So, when you click on an attachment the browser decides what to do with it.

The browser has two choices. It can open the attachment in a browser window or it can hand the attachment off to another program on your system.

Browsers will handle an attachment themselves if you've got a browser plugin installed to handle the attachment. For example, most current browsers come with a plugin for opening Adobe PDF documents. When someone clicks on a link to a PDF document, the browser can simply open the document in the browser's window.

If a browser doesn't have a plugin for handling an attachment, the attachment gets handed off to your computer's operating system. If you don't have a program for handling the attachment, the operating system usually asks you to select a program to handle the attachment. If you know what program will open the attachment, you can specify the program and--usually--that program will be called in the future when you need to open the same file format.

As with attachments handled by your e-mail program, how the file was encoded before it arrived in your mailbox can be a problem. For example, Outlook Express uses a non-standard format for encoding attachments. Until recently when our system administrators added the non-standard decoding to Web-mail, attachments encoded using Outlook Express failed to open as expected. At the risk of taking the Star Trek analogy too far, the file had suffered the equivalent of a transporter accident. Picture btis & bytes scattered all over the transporter floors and walls.

Of course, some of the other problems outlined in the section above also apply to attachments handled by Web-mail. Files can be corrupted before or during transmission and / or you may have the wrong version of software installed on your computer.

If you're having problems with attachments, be sure to call our tech support.

E-MAIL - EVERYTHING IS "MADE UP"

We covered this topic earlier in the July 2005 and January 2005 newsletters but we thought we'd expand on the topic a bit. First, as the title of this article says--everything about e-mail is "made up." That is, there is no governing Internet or e-mail regulation body that ensures e-mail messages are accurate in any way whatsoever. Nor is there much, if any, "sanity" checking in most e-mail programs people use to send their messages. As a result, pretty much everything in an e-mail message can be wrong.

For example, have you ever seen an e-mail arrive in your inbox but you can't find it? The inbox icon changes to indicate a new e-mail message or maybe the inbox title appears in bold--also indicating a new message arrived. But you look and look but it's nowhere to be found. After looking for a bit, you discover the message at the absolute end of your list of incoming messages because the sender sent their message in 1990! Obviously, the sender didn't send the message in 1990! They simply had their computer's date set wrong.

Everything can be wrong. This is especially true of most elements people rely on to review their e-mail--"to," "from," "reply-to," "subject," and time and date sent. When you setup your profile in your e-mail program, nothing prevents you from using "someperson@someplace.com" as the e-mail address associated with your account. For most people, that would be counter-productive because they want others to respond to their e-mails. For spammers, inserting some random "from" address may help them avoid unwanted complaints--or even litigation. In some instances, inserting a legitimate but incorrect "from" or "reply-to" address might help a spammer pass their messages off as genuine.

Of course, this "everything can be wrong" principle can be applied to the other e-mail fields. You could have an e-mail with a bogus "from" address, a legitimate (but incorrect) "reply-to" address, a bogus "to" address, a "subject" that indicates the e-mail relates to an enquiry you made (which you probably didn't make), and a body regarding a security message from eBay containing a link to a bogus site trying to obtain your personal information for the purpose of identity theft. Pretty much everything is wrong.

In order to get to you, the only thing that needs to be correct is the "envelope-to" address. In fact, although the message came to you, it may have gotten there because the spammer randomly generated thousands of made-up e-mail addresses and your e-mail address just happened to match.

For more information on spam and e-mail, click here and here to read our permanent help documents.